Final Woman Poster

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Development Of A Woman Poster

I’ve decided to make a poster which would use an image of a woman, so that a consumer could identify themselves with it. I would go for the vintage, 50s look as I have done throughout. I have also went for it as it is very popular nowadays and we are going back to the vintage/retro fashion and even body image. I started off with the background, created in the same manner as for previous posters – ivory background with darker polka dots. The background colour is ivory, because it is one of the the most appealing colours to women, and research shows that women are more likely to buy products with these colours than for example pink.

I started off with drawing legs, as this is where I usually start to draw people. I drew slim legs and wide hips, as this is the body image we think of as a “real women” body.

I moved on to drawing feet and shoes. Shoes are simple flat ballerinas, as the drink is for normal people on the go and this is the type of shoes that a female on the go would wear.

My next step was to draw top of the body. I created a simple t-shirt (again as this is the type of clothing for a normal, on the go woman). There is a great curve in the waist, because of the female body image people are promoting nowadays. The most trouble I had was with the shadow suggesting breasts, as it was really difficult to make them approximately the same.

Then I wanted to create hands and as one of the hands had to hold the bottle I’ve decided to first draw a bottle and then add hands onto it. To create this bottle I copied a bottle visualisation and drew its silhouette, then adding label and cutting it down to the shape of a bottle.

Once the bottle was created I could move on to drawing hands. The most difficult part at this stage was creating hand, which holds the bottle, as each finger had to be made separately and moved to the right place, so that the hand would appear to hold the bottle and at the same time look be the right size, equal to the other hand. I had also some problem with creating both hand equally thick.  

After hands it was time to make the face. This part was relatively easy, because of the tutorials we had. I started off with the shape of a head and neck. I also added hair, making them ginger as this is now very popular hair colour and we associate it with strong, independent woman, who every woman now wants to be.

 

Then I moved on to making eyes, starting with the shape and whites of the eye. I have created thick, black lines around the eye, which will then be turned into a part of makeup.

When the shape of an eye was perfect it was time to create pupils and iris. I added small white dots on each eye to simulate eye reflection and give more realistic, natural look to the eye.

After creating eyes I had to add other main face features – nose and lips. For the nose I’ve used only a few simple thin lines, to suggest where it would be and leave it to the viewers mind, to fill in the blank places giving him the chance to see it more realistically.

I finished the face off by adding more details such as eyebrows, eyelashes and some small finishing touches for the nose and lips.

After adding head to the body I placed the usual ‘boom’ sign behind with water splashing out of it, what gave even more of a vintage look to the design.

Then I have added some of the word from the poster about flavours, as this would be the main an the biggest poster/banner, hanging on the bus stops and around town, so that it gives more information about the product. I have also used the product placement on the bottom, as the logo usage required in the brief.

I finished it all off with a slogan “real women drink boost”. It is a changed version of a very powerful phrase, used nowadays – “real women have curves”. I chose this slogan as it is commonly used and has a great power on women.

 

 

Book Summary

Link to my book http://issuu.com/qw4r/docs/taxonomy_book I have changed my mind about the final design many times throughout this project, when I came up with the idea of creating a book. It seemed very simple, but actually answered to all my needs and would present my collection perfectly. All of the pages weren’t just randomly chosen, but influenced by my whole research and development which I have previously done. This is how each spread relates to development of my project:

1) Page about experience of drinking relates to the sound clips I have created at some point of my project. It was then that I realised just how much sound of an opening bottle caps add to the whole drinking experience and how recognisable it is. What made me realise that was the fact that even without any image, people could still tell that it was a sound of an opening beer.

2) Cap usage was influenced by the research into several different artists and objects created out of caps. This was inspired by most of the research I have carried out on the very beginning of the project.

3) Brand image/identity were carrying on from one of my development ideas where I looked at the cap identity. It also relates to parts of the research where I looked at what adds up to this identity.

4) Colours spread looks back at the time when I took each cap I had and looked at their colour schemes. I then compared them to find out which colours are used the most and why is that.

5) When I added a spread about shape I looked back at the time in my development when I looked at flattening the caps and working with back of them. Back then and now in the spreads I looked at how recognisable the shape of a cap is.

6) Looking at the countries and if the country in which the cap was found made any difference related to all of the maps I’ve created and me looking at the journey of my caps. It is also linked to parts of my research where I looked at differences in drinking culture in Poland and UK.

Digital Book Development

Here I am going to show digital development of my book. Pages won’t be in chronological order, because I didn’t create each page as they appear in the book. In some cases I had to wait for the next day to be able to take some photographs.

I started off with the spread about brand identity. At first I created a piece seen above with a quote by Don Johnson “Let me just say I’ve seen a pub or two”. I started off by placing photographs on the page in equal distance to each other. Then I created the writing in simple sans serif typeface and cutting the edges of each line off and put it on top of the photograph. I tried adding a bright colour overlay on the photograph to add interest to the page and make it stand out a little as majority of my development was previously about brand identity. I didn’t really like the idea, so that I’ve decided that instead of putting a colour overlay over the photographs I needed to make the type stand out a little bit more. 

After removing the layer of yellow from the photoshop file I started to add some colour to my text. I went for red as it is a very powerful colour and it is also used in both Polish and UK flags. I didn’t like the outcome at all and I thought that it looked better in white than it does now. I also wanted to move away from the idea of cut edges of the lines and leave whole words written down. 

This is when I’ve decided to put each line on the separate photo, so that they wouldn’t have this look of randomness as the previous layouts had. There was a decision to be made on what colours to use for the writing. I wanted to stick to white colour, but add another one, to give some life and interest to the page. I thought that for the colour to stand out I needed to use one which wasn’t presented on the photographs (or only in small amounts). This is how I came up with the idea of using purple, as it wasn’t used in the photographs and stands out perfectly. I had a play with colours and checked different ways of laying them out around photographs.

I thought that the phrases needed some kind of background underneath them, as even though they had bright eye-catchy colours, they still blended with the image too much, giving a feeling of being overcrowded. To change this I’ve added thick stripes underneath the words going across the photographs. I have turned the opacity down slightly, so that you could see through them and the photographs would be complete. I’ve also changed the typeface to a thinner one, as I thought the previous one was too bold and gave an aggressive look to the design. I didn’t want to have the same colours of writing and stripes over all photographs, so that I’ve used white stripe and purple text on the top and bottom stripes and then purple stripe with white text through the middle, to add some interest and life to the page.

The last step was to add this image to the book and on the opposite page write about brand identity. I have used a three column grid to lay out my text.

The brand image spread is very similar to the brand identity page. This was to show how people often think that this is the same thing. By swapping places of photographs and text I wanted to show how these two are actually different and in some cases opposite things. I have used the same amount of photographs as well as the same grid layout for both of the pages, only making them the opposite of each other.

The next spread I worked on was the one in which I divided caps into categories based on the country they were from. Above there are photographs I have chosen to present these groups. I have worked on them a little bit in photoshop later on. 

I’ve put red and blue colours in an overlay mode, choosing red for Poland and blue for United Kingdom. The choices were pretty easy as I went for the flag colours, to highlight even more that these groups were collected each in different country. I also had to turn the opacity of each colour down a little, because they were too dark at first. 

After placing the images into the spread I added the title and subtitle on the left page. I also wanted to add names of countries to each photograph. Carrying on with the idea of using colours from each map I added type in the frames using white and blue for UK and white and red for Poland.

I didn’t quite like the colours used for type, because they gave and impression of chaos and did not complete each other. This is why I came up with the idea of using only white, as both flags used this colours. After sorting out the writing I have added text onto the right page, again using the three column grid, as there was quite a lot of writing involved.

My next page was the shape and recognition. I started off by picking the scanned image and working on it in photoshop, as I had to adjust brightness and contrast of the picture. I also had to get rid of some marks left on the scanner with use of the stamp tool. 

Then I have placed the image on the left and added text o the right hand side, still using three column grid, but only writing in two columns this time. At this point I thought that this spread looked a little bit empty and it needed some changes in the layout, as well as something added to the photograph. I started to think why I wanted to write about the shape and recognition and the answer was simple – to point towards simplicity of a cap unchanged throughout the years. That’s why I wanted to add phrase “start simple” onto the caps.

In the next step I have spread out the text across the page a little bit, remembering about the grid usage and using all of the columns. I have also added a black layer with low opacity on top of the caps, as I didn’t want the writing to blend in with the image. Then I added the writing and small illustrated caps, to show how simple it was (I only needed 2 shapes to represent the cap, so that everyone knew what it was).

For the page about experience of drinking I have used a photograph of a person opening the bottle of beer. I have used this, because this is when the cap makes a very characteristic noise, which is associated straight away with pleasure, beer and free time. Originally this photograph was in colour, but in order to make the bottle the main focus I changed it to black and white as only then people wouldn’t get distracted by the colours of the clothes, sofa etc.  I have also used quite a high contrast, so that the bottle would be lighter than person holding it and stand out more.

I have then added it to my book to the one side of the spread and then wrote my text on the other side. As you can see above I didn’t quite put everything right in the grid, so that in the next step I will have to adjust this. I also think that the left page looks a little bit empty, so that I will have to change the layout.

Finally I’ve placed the text correctly in the grid. I have also moved type around the page, so that even though there was still the same amount of writing, the page would be less empty and more interesting.

Then I created a page about cap usage and how people use bottle caps to create everyday object. This was a summary of large amount of my research carried out on the beginning of this project. I have mainly looked at the artist called Yoav Kotik, who creates jewellery and accessories out of bottle caps. He then photographs them presenting them in a way which imposes that this jewellery was very expensive. I have used three of his photographs – one on the left hand side and two on the right, along with some text written in a simple three column grid.

Because of the low resolution of the photograph on the left, which I didn’t see before, I had to change this photograph to a different one. This time, because I had bigger and better image I could use a full bleed image on the page, which actually looked a lot better.

Above there are screenshots of me working with the last page. In the very end I wanted to show a quote summarising beer and the whole experience of buying, opening and drinking it. This is why a used an anonymous quote saying “Beer – because one doesn’t solve the world’s problems over white wine.” I have looked at using different typefaces and different variations of these typefaces to lay out this quote nicely on the page.

When working with colours I started off with the idea of using small rectangles, which I have previously used in my development to show colour schemes of each cap. I would show with them each colour used for caps in my collection. Firstly the colour squares had to be gathered in on document, to make sure that they were all in fact the same size. Then I could start to lay them out around the page. After first rough layout I could then start to zoom in and fill in any gaps between the caps. Even though I’ve put a lot of effort into it I wasn’t entirely happy with the outcome.

This is when I’ve decided to change squares into the stripes placed very closely nest to each other. I have tried two versions – one with the horizontal and one with vertical stripes. I thought that both looked good and I’d decide on which one to go for when they’ll be placed in the spread.

The vertical stripes were actually better for my layout, as I wanted to add some writing onto them. In order to do that I’ve placed a white, horizontal rectangle across the stripes an put my writing in there. I have also added text and title to the page. Firstly the text was in one column only, which I knew I had to change, because it left the page very busy at one side and empty on the other. 

In order to improve this I’ve divided text into two columns. Because it was still too empty I’ve added sample of my caps with colour schemes presented on top of the page. This way everyone who looked at the spread straight away would know that the stripes on the right were actually cap colours.

My next step was to work on the collection display spread. In the development of these pages, there wasn’t too much changing, as I knew from the start that I wanted to place all of my caps in there, in three rows, five columns on each page and I wanted them to be in the middle of the page. This is why I have only worked with typefaces and layout of the title to pick the best type for my spread. 

For the introduction I’ve used a photograph with a setting of accessories associated with beer and caps. I’ve placed there a bottle opener, bottle of beer and a glass. The scene was set in a green room, as this is the colour of most walls in Polish bars. We would associate a deep green colour with bar and bottle of beer. I had to only work a little bit with levels in Photoshop to adjust contrast and brightness of this photograph.

Then to get more focus to the centre of photograph I’ve added a vintage effect, by selecting a circle and then with select inverse filling it with black, To avoid having a solid shape and have a subtle gradual movement to the dark I’ve used gaussian blur and set it very high, to make sure that it was in fact very subtle.

Then I have placed the image into my book and worked with the layout. Because it was only introduction page and there wasn’t a lot of writing it was actually quite hard to find a good layout for the page. I’ve looked at sticking to the grid again, as all of my other pages worked with this grid, so that I had many restrictions to meet on my way. Above there are some of my experiments with layout.

I didn’t actually experiment with my index page, as I wanted to keep it very simple. I’ve just made sure that I was using the same typeface as I used for the titles on each page.

After creating all of my pages I moved on to creating a cover. Blurb plugin required  me to use right hand side as front and left as back of the book. I started off by creating just black and white simple cover, inspired by my research into cover designs. I have used a typeface, which can be found on some of the pages in my book. I have also used an illustration of a cap in which I have put a number 30. My book is called: 30 – story of a cap, because I was looking at a single cap, its design, what adds up to creating a cap and its perception by people and also what the cap adds up to (for example the drinking experience), however it was all shown through the prism of collection of 30 caps.

I have then looked at adding some extra detail to the cover as well as switching the colours around. I actually liked it more this way, but I thought that it didn’t quite reflect on the content of this book.

Because I liked the idea of stripes, I thought that I could use stripes from my colour scheme, so that it would reflect perfectly on the content, as well as link with one of my pages. Only this way I used the horizontal stripes rather than vertical. I really liked it and thought that this would be my final piece.

Lastly I wanted to check whether maybe I should use some of my experimental scans for the cover, but when I added photo to the document I straight away knew that this wasn’t the answer and I stick to my stripe idea. 

Finally I had to prepare my book for print. After exporting the file as pdf I had to go over notes from one session with Steve, where he taught us how to set up PDFs in Acrobat, so that they would be ready to print. I’ve changed all of my spot colours to CMYK and set the documents to double-page view. Then I could send it to Blurb. When sending my files Blurb found some problems, with sizes of my files, so that I had to go back and fix them. The second time my book uploaded just fine and I could now order it.

Printing The Book

 

Before starting to work on my book digitally I wanted to check what possibilities I’ve got in therms of printing. Firstly I went to the TECH building to ask about their double sided facilities and what paper they can supply. From there I went to University’s Printing services to see what book printing options I have and if they are open over Easter holidays. I have also looked at the Book Printing UK and Blurb websites. Finally I’ve decided to print my book with Blurb, as they provide an excellent quality to their print and I wanted my final piece to look perfect. At this point I started to look into creating a book ready to print for Blurb. I had to download the InDesign plugin, which already had everything set, so that you could start working on it straight away. After downloading it I had to familiarise myself with it and what I have to do if for example I wanted to have a full bleed photograph on one of the pages.

Experimental Scans

After creating scans of flattened caps I’ve decided to experiment a little with scanner and caps. As I wanted to call my book ‘life of a cap’ at first I started to move caps on the scanner in waves to create ‘life waves’. Below there are outcomes of my experiments. I found them really interesting and they just showed me that you can achieve more with scanner than just simply copy a document or a photo.

  

Back of the Caps

To capture flattened caps I have used a scanner rather than camera, as I thought it was a quicker and better way of doing it. It still gave me a great, high resolution outcomes, so that I didn’t feel like I needed to set up the whole studio, if I can do the same with scanner. I will use these scans it the spread about shape and recognition, where I want to show just as recognisable the shape and texture are. Even when you flatten the caps and turn them on the back you can still recognise what they are and you associate them with beer straight away. This shows how good the shape and material choice are and this is why brands don’t want to change the cap, because in the end, why would they want to change perfection?

Drinking experience

My next series of photographs were to be used in the spread about drinking experience. Bottle cap is a big part of the entire experience, mainly because of the sound it makes when opening a bottle. It is a very recognisable sound, which many people associate with pleasure and free time. To create my pictures I set out a scene in which I used all accessories needed for drinking – bottle, opener and a glass. I have also asked a person to pose for me opening a bottle, so that I could take few shots of that.

          

Where Caps Can Be Found

After taking photographs of places in which the caps were meant to be seen I moved on to taking photos of places where you actually find them. They are seen everywhere, on the ground, in the grass, on stairs, empty tables and they are treated as waste/trash. Some people look at them as treasure and collect them, but we mainly see them as something which harms our environment. I took these photographs to place into a spread about brand image, as it is how the brand is actually perceived. Finding caps on the streets and parks is a great part of how we look at the brand, so it is a part of brand image. The fact that you are exposed to the caps all the time, means that it is an extra piece of marketing. However the question is – is it more of a good or a bad marketing? In the end beer companies are making people aware of ability to recycle caps and bottles, which means they are trying to avoid littering with bottle caps.

   

Places Where You Can Buy Beer

Then I moved on to creating photographs of places where you can buy a bottle of beer (and at the same time come across a bottle cap). These photographs would be later on used in the brand identity spread in my book. I went out and photographed few pubs, shops and our old student union building, as it used to have a bar in it. These were all of the places in which a brand would like their products to be seen at and for which they’ve designed the caps, so that this is a part of their brand identity, of how they intended for the brand to be perceived.